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All Lives Matter
People who think that phrase is racist are confused and are falling for the same fictions that are tearing the country apart.
America is not a racist country any more than America is an arsonist country, or a child-abuser country, or a wife-beater country, or a serial-killer country. America isn’t defined by any of those things, though all of those things are present, to a small degree, in America.
America is defined by something else, something that is noble and good and, to our collective shame, no longer taught in our schools. America is defined by the idea that all of us matter. To make that idea real, to make it the legally protected reality in America, took two centuries and cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. But it’s reality now: all Americans matter. All lives matter.
How is it that so many now believe that any significant portion of America doesn’t believe that all lives matter? Why do so many hold to the fiction that America suffers from institutional racism, that black Americans are “systematically targeted for destruction,” as the hateful bigots of the Black Lives Matter organization put it?
They believe it because they’re ignorant. We stopped teaching an honest history of America decades ago, replacing any attempt at historical accuracy with angry and distorted revisionist claptrap that reimagines America as an evil empire, that denies two centuries of hard but successful progress toward equality and shared prosperity, and that pollutes our children’s minds with a myth of endless oppression and suffering.
America entrusted her children to a class of professional educators, and then failed to notice or intercede when those educators and their bloated administrative bureaucracies, through their own ignorance and foolishness, betrayed that trust.
And so we have the fools of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, angry ignorant hate-filled people who don’t understand the country they’re burning down, nor the roles they could play as responsible citizens if only they’d set aside their resentment and reject the myth of victimization with which they’ve been indoctrinated.
All lives matter. If you think that’s racist we should talk, because you understand neither what racism is nor what America is, and the things you believe are holding people back and tearing people down. And it doesn’t have to be that way.
Published in Culture
Confused? You give those people much more credit than I would.
Michael Connelly’s fictional LAPD detective, Harry Bosch, uses an oft-repeated mantra: “Everybody counts, or nobody counts“. Works for me.
The DA in Vallejo, CA does indeed think “All Lives Matter” is racist, and is prosecuting what is normally simple vandalism, writing this on someone else’s car, as a hate crime. Two of my friends think the hate crime prosecution is justified on the grounds that the phrase is “insensitive to Blacks”. Making a crime of “All Lives Matter” is insensitive to me, but then, I’m not Black.
This is Black Supremacy, straight up!
And that “class of professional educators” just gets more and more odious…
https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-high-school-football-thin-blue-flag
There is real malice involved. Such plainly ludicrous lies taught with resentment and loathing could not become normal over decades of objections by accident. Many are pawns, but such evils are certainly deliberate at their roots.
How did this happen?
I think that there is a one-word answer. Democrats.
The Democratic Party has been an agent of evil in this country since . . . well, forever. The type of evil shifted. They went from the slavery party, to the Jim Crow party, to the anti-American radical Leftist party.
There were some decent folks in the party, who were not vigilant about the infiltration of the neo-Marxist types.
Do you know who was right? Joe McCarthy. He’s widely vilified — even on the Right — but he was correct about Communist infiltration. Some of his tactics and rhetoric were ungentlemanly. Like the current guy from Queens.
Read @westernchauvinist excellent QOTD post: “America isn’t undergoing the trials of World War II, but something worse in its way — internal strife between those grateful for and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal. . .,” and those who wish to rule over us to impose their postmodern ideas of “social justice.” ” She has excellent quotes from Larry Arnn from Hillsdale on this.
That is why no rational argument will convince. They want to tear down America and replace it with a system where the only thing that matters is your skin color and where we are locked in an eternal power struggle, forever at each others throats. It is joyless and dystopian. They claim that America is already dystopian for them, but they project the past onto the present, ensuring that they never know a moments’ joy because of something that happened to someone else hundreds of years ago. I feel sorry for them and hope the less zealous can be converted but I lose a little more hope every day.
As I was explaining to my younger brother the other day, when he was feeling a little demoralized by the scope of the fight and our inability to contribute very much to it: if we’ll all do something, whatever we feel is within our power, we have some hope of making progress. If you have new thoughts to contribute, do that. (I don’t.) If you want to crunch the numbers and provide hard evidence to refute the left, do that. (Again, I don’t.) If you want to try to offer words to others who might lean our way but aren’t sure enough of themselves or their ability to express their thoughts, do that. (That’s what I hope to do.)
And if you want to jealously defend our right to say what we believe, and to not have our words taken from us and made illegitimate and forbidden by the tyranny of the easily offended, then by G-d do that.
“All lives matter” is both perfectly anodyne and absolutely descriptive of the soul of America.
That’s very inspiring. Especially: “And if you want to jealously defend our right to say what we believe, and to not have our words taken from us and made illegitimate and forbidden by the tyranny of the easily offended, then by G-d do that.”
All lives matter, and yet some pigs are more equal than others…
But then, in his recent book, Connelly trashes Trump for calling out our biased media. Sad!
Extraordinarily well said!
The poster children held up are generally people who would have died regardless of color.
People who deliberately screw with/refuse to cooperate with/disobey police have already lost the good will of the police. If you scare them at this point, you’re likely gonna die.
We’ll have a trial. Chances are pretty good that the police will be exonerated because you threatened them.
If innocent black people are being killed by police at a higher rate than innocent white people I want to hear about it because that is WRONG.
What has happened is that the mob has lost the ability to consider that X person died because of the actions of X person. They see only race and they only care about their own race.
Maybe I’d feel the same way in their place.
But that doesn’t make it less racist.
“Insensitive Crime” – soon to be legislated.
I think it comes down to pride, the greatest of all sins. Some people are addicted to the prideful act of virtue signaling. They put squares on their profile pictures. They put signs in their yards. They excuse rioting and murder, because they want the adulation of other members of the cult. Feeding their pride is certainly more important than truth.
That’s a good insight. Of course, I’d be told they understand it better than anyone else, since they experience the racism and I don’t, but as shorthand for a knowledge of history and the uniqueness of the American Experiment, as well as the accomplishments of markets and free people, yes. There have always been these people, but now they have the encouraging wind of the zeitgeist at their back.
Daughter and I were having a conversation about a podcast she heard – one person she knew from college, plus a friend, the usual “we’re so clever, we have such great conversations, we should do a podcast.” What struck her was the combination of confidence and ignorance about the very subjects they were discussing and supposedly studying, as if nothing had ever been learned or formulated or studied before their generation turned their brilliant minds to the subject, and how the past was a morass of ignorance and perfidy one could regard with detached amusement and rote contempt. No intellectual humility at all.
One can lack wisdom or humility, but it’s good not to lack both.
Thing is, when people say or write ‘Black Lives Matter’, they believe they are saying, “We are suffering unfair treatment and you must acknowledge this!”
Anything short of agreement is received as an attack against all black people because ‘Black Lives Matter’ is anything an adherent wants it to be.
The last thing they want to hear is, “So you just found out that black lives matter? Because I’ve known it and lived it all my life. You are just another spoiled entitled kid like all the white kids I know. Get a job.”
Of course, and that’s what allows people to interpret “all lives matter” as an aggressive statement, rather than a simple humanist observation. The problem for people who don’t buy into the BLM creed is that “black lives matter” is simultaneously three things, one of which is irrefutably good, one of which is mistaken, and one of which is noxious.
First, it’s an explicit statement that the life of a black American is as worthy and important as the life of every other American. That’s true, and nothing that any sensible person would argue against.
Secondly, it’s also an implied agreement with the erroneous belief that a substantial portion of America, including her institutions, doesn’t believe that sensible truth. This isn’t the case: virtually everyone in America believes that black lives matter. There is no nation that better exemplifies this idea that all lives, regardless of race or color or creed, matter. Nonetheless, it is this BLM fiction that one implicitly supports if one parrots the approved mantra.
Thirdly, and most offensively, because the BLM organization did an excellent job of branding, saying “black lives matter” is easily interpreted as an endorsement of that hateful, racist, destructive, deeply wrong-minded organization. There is nothing good about BLM: it seeks to drive a wedge between Americans, further undermines black American families, and generally conveys all the wrong messages in its ignorantly smug self-righteousness. It’s a toxic mess run by foolish people of questionable intent.
Having said that, the worst of those three is probably the second, the implicit endorsement of the fiction of widespread American racism. That’s the one that really holds people back, and that’s the one that needs to be countered.
“BLACK LIVES MATTER, NO MORE, BUT CERTAINLY NO LESS”
President Barack Obama, 2020 DNC convention
I agree.
Then you’ve got this NAACP chapter president with his racist views:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/naacp-talbert-swan-blue-lives-no-such-thing
His other statement, “Your career [law enforcement] is a choice – my blackness isn’t” is equally as vile. I hope he realizes responding to 911 calls in black neighborhoods is also a choice, a choice fewer and fewer police officers will be willing to make . . .
They go together. Neither is found in isolation.
This is very true, as the wisest of all men know how little indeed they really know.
All lives matter is arguably the purist and most apt distillation of Americanism there is. It’s no accident that neo-Marxists are so enraged by it. They reject America at its core.
What if we responded, ‘every life matters’?
I like that one, almost as well as “Each life matters.” To be an American aphorism, it must focus on the individual.
And it’s succinct: three words, four syllables. Excellent.
It’s basically a prosecution for blasphemy.
No fooling. “Antiracism” struggle sessions are now part of a mandatory course for incoming freshpersons at the Arizona State University.
Stacy McCain notes what the FIRE’s Robert Shibley has said:
Except that it’s not “a professor.” It’s a state university.
McCain comments:
Well, I already knew that Obama is a racist.